CLIs are alive and well, regardless of when you got your start in computing. For example, the vast majority of servers have no GUI installed. The same goes for industrial controllers, embedded systems and IoT devices.gulf between newer generations who have never touched a command line and can't conceive of a computer without a GUI desktop environment and those who were 'there at the beginning' and see the GUI for what it is
This is one reason I, among others, continue to advocate for gaining at least a basic familiarity. The other is that it's a whole lot easier to pass commands and output around on forums like this than it is to guess which GUI somebody is running, then try to explain in text what menu to open, what to click, and what the result should look like. It's faster and less error-prone, it doesn't waste time and bandwidth on screenshots or videos, and we're lazy.
This is the Debian GNU/Linux forum, not the "Debian with GNOME desktop and GNOME utilities" forum, so the solutions you're most likely to find here (and on the wiki) are the most generic and widely applicable ones.
If you only learn a GUI, you're also bound to that specific GUI. 'dd' or 'cp' works the same whether you're running KDE, GNOME, XFCE, some obscure new wayland compositor with a custom menu system, or even a non-linux unix like FreeBSD. They'll also work if your GUI is broken somehow or nvidia drivers won't compile and you need to make a livecd to fix it. There are a myriad reasons you might need to use a CLI, and age really has very little to do with it.
Statistics: Posted by steve_v — 2024-06-07 05:35